An article was posted yesterday on Slate pushing the idea that, while Google is great for searching overall, there are three glaring ways in which it fails. That’s crap.
Type in the make and model of a new DVD player, and you’ll get dozens of online electronic stores in the top results, all of them eager to sell you the item. But you have to burrow through the results to find an impartial product review that doesn’t appear in an online catalog.
Sure, if I search for SVR-2000 (my TiVo unit), then I get almost all stores. If I want reviews, though, I’d be searching for SVR-2000 product review instead—a search with much more relevant results.
Search for “apple” on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer…
Well, duh. That makes sense. If I want to learn something about the fruit, then I’d search for apple fruit, which, again, returns relevant results.
More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format… when you’re doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books.
If you’re doing serious, legitimate research and you’re limiting yourself to just stuff you can find online… well, then you deserve what you get. Moron.
Do people actually think that one-word searches in any search engine are going to produce useful results? If you want to know about tire tread depth and tire wear, then you aren’t going to search for tire. but rather tire tread depth wear. Take some responsibility for yourself. Sheesh.
Posted Thursday July 17, 2003
in Rants by Chris Curtis
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NO kidding. I don’t have to remind you of my recent excapade with my boss over why were on page two of MSN’s search engine when he typed in “union clothes”.
An update on that conversation: he congratulated me a week or two ago because that same search in MSN then put us at number 4 on page 1. As if I did something to make that happen.
Moral to the story: ignorance as to the workings of search engines is rampant. People can’t imagine that if the results for what they typed in aren’t relevant to them that they would be relevant to anyone.
Examples: DVD Player--that search worked fine for someone who was wanting to shop around for that model to find the best price. Apple--again, anyone wanting for find things relevant to macs got just want they wanted from that search. PDFs, etc.--Amen. $20 says this guy doesn’t even own a library card. Secondly--Google’s crawler automatically crawls through PDFs and makes HTML versions available through the search results. How freakin’ cool and useful is that?
He’s just a lame brain hatah.
By Derek Jones on July 17, 2003 at 03:09pm link